Visualising Activity on Mobile Browsers

Christoffer Björkskog

Helsinki June 4, 2008 Master’s Thesis UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Department of Computer Science HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO — HELSINGFORS UNIVERSITET — UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Tiedekunta/Osasto — Fakultet/Sektion — Faculty Laitos — Institution — Department

Faculty of Science Department of Computer Science Tekijä — Författare — Author Christoffer Björkskog Työn nimi — Arbetets titel — Title

Visualising Social Network Activity on Mobile Browsers Oppiaine — Läroämne — Subject

Työn laji — Arbetets art — Level Aika — Datum — Month and year Sivumäärä — Sidoantal — Number of pages Master’s Thesis June 4, 2008 65 pages + 5 appendix pages Tiivistelmä — Referat — Abstract Online social communication and contribution is very common today. There are many different online social networks and it is difficult to follow the activities in all. In this thesis we study whether online social activities can be aggregated and visualised in a graspable way on mobile Web browses using AJAX technologies.

We have created Funnelry, a mashup application, designed to fetch the online activities of the user’s friends from different services and present them in a filtered list view on mobile web browsers.

This thesis comes to the conclusion that it is currently possible to visualise these activities on certain mobile browsers using AJAX technologies. It is possible that in a near future most mobile Web browsers will support these technologies. Clustering and filtering out data that is not interesting to the user is needed when there is a great deal of online activities going on.

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS): H.3.5 [Online Information Services], H.4.3 [Communications Applications], H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems], H.5.2 [User Interfaces]

Avainsanat — Nyckelord — Keywords Web 2.0, mobile media, visualisation, user interfaces, service aggregation, mobile AJAX Säilytyspaikka — Förvaringsställe — Where deposited

Muita tietoja — övriga uppgifter — Additional information ii Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Social Media Services and Web 2.0 2 2.1 Social Media Services ...... 2 2.2 Web 2.0 ...... 6

3 Capabilities of Mobile Web Browsers 8

4 Web Usability 10 4.1 Usability ...... 10 4.2 Web Usability ...... 11 4.3 Mobile Web Usability ...... 12 4.4 Usability and Data Visualisation ...... 15

5 Service Aggregation 25 5.1 Techniques ...... 25 5.2 Syndication and Aggregation ...... 31 5.3 Mashups ...... 32

6 Implementation of Funnelry 40 6.1 Example Scenarios ...... 40 6.2 Specifications ...... 41 6.3 Architecture ...... 43 6.4 User Interface Prototype ...... 47 6.5 Implementation ...... 48 6.5.1 Navigation ...... 48 6.5.2 Visualising Activities ...... 53 6.6 Loading Times ...... 56 6.7 Lessons Learned ...... 58 iii

7 Conclusion 59

8 Acknowledgements 59

References 60

Appendices

A Test

B Test

C AJAX Code Sample

D Google Maps API Code Sample

E Loading Times 1 Introduction

Human beings are social creatures with an ability to work together in groups, cre- ating value that is greater than the sum of its parts [WM08]. Many online services exist where users can contribute with content and communicate with each other. For example, many people have an online where they publish their thoughts. According to a questionnaire targeted at American users, social and pro- fessional networking sites have increased in popularity, people remix online content, categorise, or "", online content and upload photos, videos and content they have produced